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There is a recent story in the New York Times on the
growing use of labor-saving robots to increase production
efficiency and, by replacing low-cost overseas labor, to return
production to our shores. But the operative term here is “labor
saving.” They return production to our shores, but given that
they do so by replacing the low-cost foreign labor with machines,
it opens up the question of the implications for employment once
the production returns. If the robotic revolution is successful,
will all the unskilled laborers that are being replaced move up
the chain into more skilled and higher paying jobs? Or will they
simply be replaced?
This is a critical question right now, because it is at the
center of whether the high level of unemployment is structural
rather than cyclical. By the time the dust settles on the
cyclical component, we may discover we are looking into a growing
chasm of labor-lite production.
In some cases, replacing human labor with robots may be a good
thing all around. Take the development of robotic warehouses.
Warehouse packing is the sweatshop job of our time. The article
“I Was a Warehouse Slave” gives a
day-in-the-life view of these workers, effectively paid for
piece-work, without benefits, with one-day notice job security,
in physically grueling conditions. (The warehouse workers are
usually employed by temp agencies that act as what I would call
“labor launderers”, a buffer between the sub-par conditions of
the workers and the image of the company that uses them).
There are a number of companies now that provide robotic
solutions for many of these jobs. One of them, recently acquired
by Amazon, is Kiva Systems. I first saw what their robots can do
at a Wired Conference a few years ago. Check out this
video from that conference, or any number of other ones on
their robots. It is amazing and entertaining. Another company in
the same space is the start-up Symbotic, but they don't seem to
have any cool videos out yet.
The problem, of course, is that a sweatshop job might be better
than no job at all. So what do these workers do next. This is
where the “Well, someone will have to make all those robots” sort
of refrains begin. From the New York Times article: “Robotics
executives argue that even though blue-collar jobs will be lost,
more efficient manufacturing will create skilled jobs in
designing, operating and servicing the assembly lines, as well as
significant numbers of other kinds of jobs in the communities
where factories are. And robot makers point out that their
industry itself creates jobs. A report commissioned by the
International Federation of Roboticslast year
found that 150,000 people are already employed by robotics
manufacturers worldwide in engineering and assembly jobs.”
Well, common sense tells you that you don't replace five
$30K-a-year workers with a $250K robot only to reemploy those
five workers in other, higher-paying jobs to build and maintain
the robots that just replaced them. There will be skilled jobs in
designing, operating and servicing the assembly lines. But
obviously not as many jobs as the robots replace, and, taking
nothing away from the potential for retraining, most likely not
to be filled by the unskilled workers who just lost their
jobs.
We have a ingrained view that when one door for labor demand
closes, another one opens, that the march of economic progress
pushes the workers along with it. It has happened in the past,
and in a spectacular way. For example, the industrial revolution
came about by the efficiencies that reduced the need for labor in
agriculture, freeing up labor for industry. The push of the
unemployed and disenfranchised from the farms into the factories
was critical for the industrial revolution because at the outset
the industrial jobs were not attractive enough for those in
agriculture to leave their land and move into the factory system
voluntarily. The same has continued over the course of the
industrial age. As industry after industry developed efficiencies
of production that reduced the need for unskilled labor, new jobs
opened up either because of new skills being required to deal
with new manufacturing methods, because the raw demand for
consumption expanded the labor demand, or because new products,
even new industries arose.
But it doesn't always have to happen that way. Where do the
displaced workers go this time around? To say that they will move
up the chain and go into more skilled jobs building the robots is
glib. The entire point is that the robots are labor saving. It
certainly is not a good business proposition if they save on the
cheap labor but pay out more for more skilled labor.
Whatever analogue there is to the Industrial Revolution, workers
do not play much of a role in it. It is interesting that u to
this point much of the displacement from computers has been in
the mid-level jobs, like bookkeepers. These medium skill jobs
that focus on rote but quantitive tasks are the easiest for a
computer to do. Replacing workers
doing relatively unskilled, manual tasks is actually
more difficult. But the rubicon is being crossed. For example,
Meyakawa Manufacturing is shipping robots that can
debone chickens at the rate of 1,500 per hour, replacing ten
human workers. As one commentator put it, “if you can do that,
you can do most anything.”